ON SALE 29.07! DIY Tech Weekly: A look at the raspberry Pi Zero (And where to buy one)

UPDATE 29.07: Pimoroni is having a birthday sales for its 4th birthday – free Blinkt! and Pi Zero when you spend over £100!

The Raspberry Pi Zero is unarguably one of the most buzz-worthy Single Board Computers, or SBC’s, for short, that has come out over the past few years. Rightfully so. It packs a Linux-capable computer onto a PCB no bigger than 65*30mm, for a whopping $5 only. The twist? It’s almost impossible to get your hands on – the first run was sold out in mere 24 hours, and where I’m from, the only local supplier stocked 3 of them at 25$ each. That’s a bit much for a hobbyist.

Thus, when I recently stumbled upon a YouTube comment stating that there was a place to buy the Pi Zero for it’s intended market cost of $5 – I became rather exited.

They’re still in stock at Pimoroni, where I ordered.

Turns out that indeed, http://pimoroni.com has a rather nice stock of the Pi Zero at hand. The only limitation being – one Pi Zero per order. Ok, I can live with that. So I gave in and bough the Pi Zero + Adaptors offering for $8 + transit to Estonia – totaling up at around 15$.

Order

Took a few days of waiting for the order to ship over the weekend, and then 3 more days for it to arrive. I hereby present my Raspberry Pi Zero upon arrival.

I also threw in an old USB HUB I had laying around, to connect everything I need.

Connectivity

“But wait a second, the Pi Zero doesn’t have internet!” Correct, it doesn’t. I also didn’t throw in a USB dongle, because I want to try and see if I can get this working for Wi-Fi first… I’ve got a couple of the ESP8266 modules laying around, should make an interesting build… Meanwhile, I’m using the Pi by means of ssh over USB. I might talk about that a bit longer in an upcoming post, if you’re interested, let me know in the comments!

What’s next

Well, next Up I want to

Get Internet on the Pi

Turn it into a media center for now

I’ll write about both of these in upcoming posts, but for now, this has been a quick look at the Raspberry Pi Zero. Thanks, see you in a week – 2 weeks.

nice! pi zero is much better than all of those copycats lousy boards. pimoroni & adafruit had stocked up a lot after pi zero started production again. I cannot buy them because I need 2 for my video surveillance projects and they limit 1 per household. If they do cancel that rule, I will mostly buy if I still need them for my projects. Too bad Pi zero is created to condemn those copycats and the company’s real intention.